Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
On arriving at Matlock police station, Alec had deposited Miss Birtwhistle, sullen and silent as ever, in a typically dingy and depressing interview room, with a cup of muddy coffee and a constable standing at the door.
The mass of charred material from her grate was rushed off to the analyst in Derby.
Awaiting Alec in a minimally more congenial office was the young constable sent to call at every chemist’s shop in Matlock and its associated villages, Matlock Green, Matlock Bridge, Matlock Bank, and Matlock Bath, not to mention Matlock Dale and Dimple.
Still red-faced and puffing from his strenuous bicycle-ride, PC Phipps stood stiffly at attention as Alec and Piper entered.
Alec sat down at the desk. Ernie Piper took a seat nearby. “Go ahead, Officer,” Alec invited.
Phipps turned slowly through the pages of his notebook, found his place, and started reading in a monotone.
“‘In accordance with instructions, I proceeded to—’”
“No, no,” Alec said, trying to conceal his impatience. One couldn’t expect a country constable to equal the quick wits of a Scotland Yard detective constable, or even an ordinary uniformed bobby of the Metropolitan Police. “I don’t need every word. Can you pick out the relevant parts for me?”
Phipps blenched. “I’ll try, sir. Umm…” He turned a couple more pages, seeking inspiration. “What it boils down to, really, sir, is four of ’em filled prescriptions for chloral yesterday, but none of ’em was for any one of the names I was told. They was all personally known to the chemists, sir.”
“Damn!”
“Then I was sent back to Asbury’s, sir, down by the bridge, about the bromide.
Sergeant Cappendell said to find out the doctor who prescribed the stuff to Miss Birtwhistle.
We got more doctors hereabouts than most towns this size,” Phipps confided, “acos of the sick people coming to stay at the hydros. The smaller ones don’t employ their own medical men.
Mr. Asbury said it was Dr. Harris wrote the prescription. ”
“Harris.” The name rang a bell.
“Dr. Knox’s locum last night, sir,” Piper reminded him. It was the sort of detail Piper always had at his fingertips, like sharp pencils.
Sometimes Alec wondered whether he relied too often on Ernie’s memory, his own atrophying from lack of use. “We’ll have to see Dr. Harris,” he said. “Piper, see if you can set up an appointment, will you? Or at least discover where we’re likely to find him at this hour.”
“Happen he’ll be at home, sir,” put in PC Phipps. “Getting on a bit, he is, and don’t do more home visits than he has to these days.” He tilted his hand in a significant gesture: Dr. Harris was a tippler.
Alec nodded to Piper, who went out, there being no telephone in the room. “Anything else that struck you, Officer?”
“Well, sir, Mr. Asbury did mention that he’d warned Miss Birtwhistle about taking the stuff all the time.” He consulted his notebook. “‘Long-term use,’ is what he said.”
“He didn’t say how long Miss Birtwhistle has been taking it?”
“No, sir.” Phipps crimsoned. “I didn’t think to ask, sir. I can go back…”
“That’s all right. We’ll get on to it.” Thanking him, Alec dismissed him to go and write up his report, in which, no doubt, he would “proceed according to instructions.”
Things looked black for Lorna Birtwhistle on the bromide front.
However, the fatal dose of chloral was far more important, and the lack of information about its origin was exceedingly frustrating.
Two possibilities remained: Someone had obtained it some time ago and awaited an opportunity to use it; or Norman Birtwhistle had got hold of it on his journey to Derby.
In either case, the likelihood was that it had been prescribed by a Matlock doctor.
He should have asked Phipps just how many doctors and chemists dwelt in the Matlocks. It looked as if it might be necessary to visit all the former and revisit all the latter, checking past records.
Piper returned. “Dr. Harris is at home, Chief. He takes a nap after lunch, his wife said, so we’d best go right away. But Miss Birtwhistle—”
“Let her stew in her own juice for a while. She can be thinking about how she’s going to explain why she tried to destroy the bromide.”
Superintendent Aves delayed them for a few minutes. He was hoping to have his decision to ask the deputy CC to call in the Yard justified by their rapid progress in solving the case.
He was not very happy to hear that they had been “sidetracked,” as he put it, by the issue of Humphrey Birtwhistle’s long illness.
“When there’s a murderer at large,” he pointed out, his moustache bristling, “I’m not going to be able to fob off the press with an arrest for grievous bodily harm, if that’s what it amounts to. The fellow from the Derby Telegraph is already hounding me.”
“I don’t know about that, sir,” said Alec.
“It seems to me, if you put it to him right, he can make a good story of a woman deliberately dosing her brother to keep him in poor health, for years. Not that we’re at the point where you can say much more than that someone is helping us with our enquiries. ”
Aves grunted. “We don’t want too good a story, come to that, or we’ll have the London papers round our necks.
I can’t think how it got about, how the Telegraph obtained the news,” he added crossly.
Alec raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I know,” Aves went on even more crossly, “a small town, everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Police coming and going, making enquiries.
The fellow even knows chloral was used.”
“Between the switchboard girls and the chemists’ shops, it was bound to come out. With luck, it may help us to have that information in the paper. Someone somewhere must know where the damn stuff came from.”
The superintendent brightened. “I should confirm the chloral, then?”
“Yes, by all means, sir.”
“It’s something to give him, at any rate. Better not go out through the front lobby. He’s lying in wait and you don’t want him getting his hooks into you.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll just have a word with your inspector—Kennedy, is it? And then we’ll sneak out the back way.”
Inspector Kennedy, stout, round-faced, his moustache slightly bushier than his super’s but no rival to Tom Tring’s, absorbed with gratification the Scotland Yard man’s praise of his constable’s thoroughness and ability to summarise.
He was less pleased to hear that the same ground might have to be covered again.
“’Fraid so,” said Alec, “unless Dr. Harris has and is willing to give us the information we need.”
“But checking back records! How far back? Days? Weeks? Months?”
“Good question. I don’t know how long the stuff remains effective after dispensing, but I presume any chemist can tell us.”
“My men do have a lot of country to patrol, Chief Inspector. Wild goose chases…”
Piper cleared his throat.
“I’ll put DC Piper here on it,” said Alec. “It’s the sort of detail work he’s best at.”
Somewhat mollified, Kennedy offered, “Phipps can show him on a map the best route to cover all the chemists’ shops.”
“Thank you. Piper, you’d better come with me to see Dr. Harris first, in case his records have to be gone through. We must get going. We don’t want to interrupt his lunch.”
Leaving by the back door, they made their way to Dr. Harris’s house and surgery on Dimple Road, near the bottom of the hill, fortunately.
Ernie looked up the hill, gazed round at the lie of the land—rising in all directions from the river, and said, “I hope I’m not going to have to cycle from chemist’s to chemist’s! I’m out of practice.”
“Out of shape. It’s too easy to hop on a bus or take the tube in town.”
“A sight quicker.” Ernie rapped on the doctor’s green front door with the brass staff-and-serpent knocker.
A parlourmaid in white cap and apron opened the door. “Ooh, you’ll be the detectives from Scotland Yard? Doctor’s waiting for you. Please to come this way.”
Alec and Piper exchanged a look. Small town—everyone knew everyone else’s business.
She ushered them into a small waiting room. A miscellany of well-worn chairs lined two walls, all unoccupied as surgery hours were over. Cane-bottomed, rush-bottomed, Windsor, no two matched. They looked as if they had been picked up here and there secondhand and had a hard life since.
The maid went straight to an open door on their left and announced dramatically, “It’s the detectives, sir. From Scotland Yard.”
“Yes, yes,” said a testy voice, “show them in.”
Dr. Harris was a small man with a grey Edwardian beard and moustache. He peered at his visitors over half-glasses, then stood up behind a knee-hole desk littered with papers held down by a stethoscope, an otoscope, and a box of tongue-depressors.
“Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher, sir.” Alec offered his warrant card.
The doctor waved it away with a “Yes, yes, they rang up from the police station. What can I do for you?”
He sat down, and Alec took that as an invitation to seat himself on one of the two elderly mismatched chairs opposite him.
A good thing he hadn’t sent Tom, he thought.
The chair might not have survived. Ernie Piper remained on his feet, his back to one of the bookcases stuffed with ancient medical tomes.
Another held dusty box files, squeezed in in such a way as to make extracting any particular one a major exercise.
Loose papers jammed the space between each row of files and the shelf above.
A chaise longue covered with faded American cloth presumably served as the examination couch.
“Doctor, we have evidence that yesterday you prescribed a sedative, specifically potassium bromide, to Miss Lorna Birtwhistle.”
“Yes, yes, she has trouble sleeping. Not uncommon in females of a certain age. Miss Birtwhistle has been taking it for a couple of years now without any ill effects. Yesterday I merely renewed her prescription.”